The Eyes Have It

Gerald

Last time, I talked about the general aspects of webdesign, and we, as website owners, need to ensure that the visitors and browsers have the best experience they can when they visit our site. There is no doubt that web usability is one of the hot topics today (initially championed by Jakob Neilsen), and we must take off our ‘techie’ hat, and put on our ‘user’ hat, to try to experience our website as the users do.

One of the best printed works on this subject is by Steve Krug: “Don’t make me think too much”. His premise is that the user experience needs to be as slick, easy and professional as possible. Any time the user needs to think to use your website, you’re in danger of losing him or her.

So, what aspects of the website should we consider in our analysis? For me, there are four:
1) Initial visual impression
2) Understanding of where you are
3) Navigation to other, possibly more relevant, parts of the website
4) Comfort level in the website use

IVI
I briefly touched on the topic of initial visual impression (IVI) last time. This is based on those first few couple of seconds when the page starts to load. It shouldn’t need to be said, by the way, that the page load time should be as short as possible, even in these times of high speed broadband access. There is nothing worse for a user than to follow a link or a search engine result to your site, and then be presented with a Flash presentation “Loading …. 3%” message. The user will make a judgement, based on how quickly that percentage increases in the first couple of seconds. If, after that time, it’s still in single figures, the user will navigate away.

Similarly, if your landing page is laden with uncompressed photos, which display themselves line by line, the user begins to think that you don’t care about them, and their precious time which is being wasted watching stuff load.

Rule 1 – Flash presentation should be an ‘opt-in’, or allow an ‘opt-out’ at the very least.
Rule 2 – All photos must be compressed down to thumbnails. If the user wants to see them, they can click on them to show the greater detail. Again, they can ‘opt-in’ if they wish.

LOCATION
You cannot guarantee that your visitors will land on your website at the front, or home, page. More and more, internet users are searching for their web content, and as a result, they could land at your website on any page, displaying the specific content they searched for. To encourage them to stay and spend more time at your site, and possibly find more content that suits them. So, what’s important is that it is obvious what page they’re on, where the home page is, and how to explore your website. Which brings us to the third topic:

NAVIGATION
Clear, consistent navigation is possibly the most important visual aspect of your website. Hovers, to highlight parts of the navigation, are good, but nav buttons which have their function hidden until you hover over it are a strict no-no. Navigation is something we’ll discuss in more detail in the next post.

COMFORT
This is possibly the most difficult aspect to define. We (that surf the internet a lot) will know when we feel ‘comfortable’ when we visit a website. It looks good, the navigation is easy to use and makes sense, the content we want to access is easy to access – if it is a written piece, the text needs to be legible, even for those with slight visual impairments. The overall look and feel of the site needs to convey the impression you want to give – the more professional your site is, the more the user should be able to relate to it in that manner. Common mistakes are over-elaboration, too many text fonts and colours, unnecessary graphic animation in several areas of the page, and lack of ‘white space’.

There are many other visual elements to website design, but these four define the user experience, which we should be promoting and improving at every opportunity.

Posted in Web Design, Miscellaneous | 3 Comments »

When Content Isn’t King

Gerald

As a blogger, I’ve often heard the phrase “Content is King!” We all know what it means - to become a more successful blogger, you need to create thought-provoking, useful, or just plain interesting content to engage your readers. Which is good, as far as it goes.

But what if you’re not getting the readers?

What if you’re traffic stats say you’re getting the hits, but their average ’stay’ time is a minute, or less? Are they really reading your content? What value is the content, when no one can be bothered to read it?

This is my first blog post at EarnersForum, and I will be writing about what makes casual browsers into customers – either of your products or your content.

Becoming successful on the internet used to be easy. Anything dot com used to attract massive funding, and permit you to have a first-class lifestyle on a third rate business idea. This was the dot-com boom that was followed, as surely as night follows day, by the dot-com crash. The dot-com emperor really did have no clothes. Wikipedia has a number of well-known “dot-bombs” as they call it: Dot-Bombs

Looking at Boo.com as an example (a company that ate, drank, flew and advertised its way through $120m-worth of funding), there were a number of reasons quoted for the failure, but most of them centred around the user experience. Slow internet connections, massive graphics, late delivery of website functionality, and massive over-estimation of sales targets meant the venture was doomed almost before it started. If you like gloating over other people’s mistakes, there’s some more on CNet.

How do you avoid these hugely expensive mistakes, and ensure that your online venture is successful?

Let’s take a first-time visitor. What does he/she see when the page resolves in the browser window? Is it a mish-mash of icons, graphics, fonts, images and colours? Or is it something pleasing to the eye? Let’s quickly compare a couple of websites.

Copyblogger is the online presence of Brian Clark. His writing is clear, and his ideas are inspirational. But what do you see when you load up his website? Loads of colours and nice graphics, and … wait a minute … is there writing in there? The only reason I chose this blog was because it used to be a paragon of the “easy read” virtue – clean and efficient. I understand that Brian needs to make some money, but in my opinion, his new scheme is not as good as the old. To see how it used to look, see the site of Chris Pearson.

For more visual inspiration, look at Elliot Back’s Website.

For my next blog post, I shall be writing about the specifics of website visual design, and the elements that will assist you in creating that successful online presence. After that, we’ll be looking at user behaviour when viewing websites.

Posted in Web Design | 3 Comments »